


the pale blue dot

by kouraai



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, astronomers au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 17:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17729897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouraai/pseuds/kouraai
Summary: It’s dark out now, and they’re lit only by the soft warm lights of the windows of the observatory, but when Johnny turns to look at Jaehyun instead of up at the stars, it’s almost as if he can see him clearly for what feels like the first time. The cool light of the moon, hung in the sky as if just for them, strikes the planes of Jaehyun’s face and makes him soft and blurry, almost as if Johnny’s looking through a lens scattered with sun flares, and suddenly, Johnny doesn’t really care about the comet, he’s much more interested in looking at Jaehyun as they experience it together.this is how i think johnny would fall in love with jaehyun. happy stargazing.





	the pale blue dot

Johnny hates to lean into stereotypes, but he thinks he has been in love with the stars for forever.

The thing about space is that _everyone_ has loved space, at one point in their life or other. To this end, everyone still kind of does, even if it’s as simple as the occasional glance at the stars when taking the trash out, or the fleeting appreciation of a stock smartphone wallpaper. It’s the same type of love Johnny has, just to a wildly different extent. He figures astronomers were just kids who loved space who never really grew out of it. Any astronomer, given the right question, would fondly recount their dozens of childhood hours poring over huge astronomy atlases, the kind that are only for reference in the public library, or looking up astrophotography online, or being enchanted by when the house lights turn off and slowly at first, then all at once, the stars come alive in the sky. Johnny could do the same, and his parents and teachers could probably tell the same stories about him. He just never really grew out of them. Maybe he _is_ a stereotype, but for as much as Johnny hates them, he doesn’t think he minds the ones associated with _astronomer_ , because they’ve remained too true for him over the course of his adult life that he’s sure that it was people like him who pioneered them, not fallen into their vague archetypes. He does, in fact, have the tendency to go on long-winded spiels about the fallacies of astrology (“It is _not_ equally as valid as astronomy, Ten, we’ve been over this,”), and will vehemently defend his opinions on aliens until people stop listening. He doesn’t mind being made fun of by his labmates for the disheveled hair, the thin, gold, wire-rimmed glasses, or his tendency to be rushing places while holding large stacks of loose paper that he can never quite seem to hang on to. His hatred for stereotypes is overruled by the simple and pure fact that Johnny Suh fucking _loves_ space.

It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that he has no clue in particular _why_ he is so endeared with the notion of the stars and the planets. He thinks, vaguely, that it’s the simple fact of it all that enchants him so much. The stars are there, they’re _real_ , and so is he, and for some reason, he really likes that. This, even Johnny has to admit, is a bullshit answer. But it’s the only one he can come up with, and he can advise first-hand that it sucks at deflecting overbearing questions from distant family members who decide it’s their business to judge his career path. It hardly ever works in dispersing their judgmental _hems_ and _haws_ , but it’s really the only answer he can manage without getting into the nitty-gritty of it all. Just like his deals in space and on earth, though, there are two spheres to this aspect of Johnny’s life, and there _is_ a second frontier. He has a second trick up his sleeve, and he has yet to see it fail. Johnny will put on his nicest face, laugh off their snipes at his choice of profession, and ask the parents very politely if he can explain to their children, usually his little cousins, what he does in a little more depth.

He always starts with the same example. The very first Hubble Deep Field, taken in 1995. He pulls up the photo on the big monitor in his room, and lets the kid sit in the big-kid chair while he maneuvers the mouse off to the side.

“Let me tell you the story of this picture. If you imagine the night sky, what do you think of? There are lots and lots of stars, and the moon, in different shapes depending on what time of the month you’re thinking of. There are so many things up there that we can see by just looking up."

"But do you ever wonder what’s _in between_ the stars? There can’t just be nothing, forever and ever. Well, we can’t see that far. Our eyes aren’t powerful enough."

"So a bunch of smart people who were wondering the same thing decided to find out. There’s a _biiiiig_ telescope in the Earth’s atmosphere,” and he stretches the ‘big’ here for dramatic effect, hamming it up a little, “and its name is Hubble. What Hubble can do that we can’t is see all those things, really really far away, that we can’t, and make them into pictures that we _can_ see. So they picked a random dark spot in the sky, pointed Hubble towards it, and this is what we got back."

"Thousands and thousands of galaxies, just like ours, with all their own planets, and stars, probably millions and billions of them. Think of everything we know about our galaxy. Our solar system is in it, that’s right. We live here. You live here. All your friends, your parents, your room, all your toys. Even your teachers and the principal. But there are _so many more_ just like it. More than we could ever count. This picture is just a tiny little speck in the sky."

"Anywhere you look into space about this size,” and he pinches his pointer finger and thumb together to make a tiny little gap between them, “ _all of this_ is inside that.”

He can practically hear their brain explode. There are always questions, that Johnny does his best to answer, even when they’re dumb ones, like _how come the galaxies don’t fall_ or _how come the telescope get to see them and I don’t, that’s not fair._ He’ll click through Google for a while, showing the kid some of his other favorite mind-blowing photos. It’s when the kid runs back to their parents, spouting off odds and ends of the facts that Johnny’s dropped on them, begging to stay up late to see the stars, that Johnny thinks that people really begin to understand why he loves space. For all he doesn’t and will never know about space, it is somehow everywhere, and everything he knows. It fills up the edges of his life, seeping in through the cracks in everything else. If all else failed, all he had to do was look up and put the rest of the world, including his own thoughts, on pause for a while. 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Taeyong had sniped over a cup of coffee when Johnny tried to explain it to him. “You’re an astronomy grad student. I’d like to imagine that you look up at the night sky and have _plenty_ of thoughts. That _is_ what you’re on a scholarship to do, after all.”

That, too, he must acknowledge. Johnny figures that he must have spent about an equal amount of time now looking at the sky and having lots and lots of thoughts, most of them to do with astronomy assignments, calculus, or other equivalently irritating subject, and time spent looking and having no thoughts at all. Johnny’s affections for space had followed him to university, where he had discovered that the love of the subject itself had done very little in actually preparing him to study it intensely. In a competitive program, he had learned that while he loved astronomy, he had very little affection for its periphery subjects, among which laid calculus, physics, and statistics. But passion, if not providing in knowledge itself, was very nicely conducive to working hard to achieve something, and Johnny had started to look up at the night sky and see a challenge. Maybe a more mathematical mind than his would look up at the sky that he had been studying for so long and see nothing but physics, calculations and chemical compounds of gas and solids floating and burning thousands of lightyears away. But Johnny’s always had a talent for not being the brightest, and when he glances up at the sky tonight as he walks up the hill to the observatory, he is grateful for the fact that he can simply stare at the stars and not have any thoughts at all.

There are worse things to be stereotyped for, after all.

Tonight would be a strange in-between night, where he could think about astronomy vaguely, noticing constellations and weather only in the back of his head, like background noise, while quietly focusing on his photographs. He’s running a lab for the undergraduate astronomy students, who would spend a few hours in the observatory, making notes of constellations, their motion through the night and positioning based on the time of year and the time. While not particularly simple, it was busy work for graduate students for Johnny, who just had to make sure the equipment was running to standard and could otherwise focus on his own work.

It’s well into darkness when he unlocks the door to the observatory, letting a small group of waiting students in behind him. He shows them into the huge domed room and gives the usual safety spiel before leaving them with a stack of worksheets and a wish of good luck, directing any questions they might have to himself, who would be working outside.

The night was clear, perfect for both the lab and his own work. The observatory was located at the top of a hill, not too far of a walk from main campus but quite the steep hike. The path was unlit but familiar to him, making it unfriendly to strangers but almost homely to him. He’s just setting up his tripod when he sees a figure approach him out of the corner of his eye, indistinct in the low light. They hang back for a little, and Johnny ignores them, choosing to focus on the viewfinder and its projection of his night sky.

“Did you need a worksheet? They’re in the back room, make sure to write your section on it or it won’t be graded,” he says lazily after a moment, not looking up from the dial he’s adjusting.

“Oh, no thank you. I’m not a student, just here to watch.”

This catches him off-guard. He looks up from the camera setup, to meet the eyes of a young man, roughly around his age. His hair is dark, but the moonlight catches it nicely, framing his face pleasantly.

“Oh, my apologies. I assumed you were here for the constellations lab.”

He laughs, gentle and a little awkward, and glances at the ground. “No, just a casual. Please, don’t let me interrupt you.”

Johnny sets the heavy camera down, letting it fully rest on the tripod. “Absolutely not, you’re fine. I’m Johnny, graduate student at the university. I’m supervising a constellations lab for astronomy undergrads tonight, but they seem to have everything under control.”

The man eyes the complicated setup laid on the pavement in front of Johnny warily. “Jaehyun. Pleased to meet you. You’ll excuse my forwardness, this seems a little out of the depth of undergraduates, if I’m not underestimating them,” he chuckles.

“Oh, this?” Johnny looks at his photography gear, as if registering for the first time its complexity. “You’d be right. This is my personal work. I do astrophotography. Just a hobby, but it’s how I keep myself sane through graduate work.”

Jaehyun hums in acknowledgement and nods, but doesn’t say anything else. Figuring Jaehyun would move on to whatever his business was in the observatory, Johnny returns to his camera, but when he doesn’t seem to move away, Johnny looks over his shoulder to look at the young man again.

“I’m sorry, but is there something I can help you with…?”

He seems taken aback, even if only for a moment, and flushes slightly. “Oh! No, not at all. I just assumed the observatory was free access for university associates, and I’m just here to look around - I read about the museum online? I’ve been meaning to come up here for so long, it just seems so interesting, but if I’m intruding, by all means, please let me know and I’ll-”

It’s Johnny’s turn to fluster. “No! No, you’re welcome to stay. We don’t get many visitors,” he admits, fidgeting in this spot slightly. “You’re absolutely welcome to have a look around. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, it’s what I’m here for.”

They lapse into an odd silence again, as if either is waiting for something to happen. Johnny is about to turn back to his photography, but Jaehyun seems to have something else to say. Then, quietly. “Actually, could you tell me anything about what you’re working on now? I’m fascinated by this camera.”

It would really seem like he is, even though Johnny can’t seem to see why. Jaehyun’s voice expresses nothing but plain and simple curiosity for the contraption he’s currently finagling with, and it shows so clearly on his face that Johnny is almost surprised at how strongly and earnestly he realizes that he wants to tell him all about what he’s working on.

“Well,” he starts, uncertainly, “this is a pretty basic astrophotography mount. There’s a telescope part, obviously, hooked up to a standard DSLR. Deep-sky astrophotography requires a pretty long exposure because the objects are so far away and so faint, so nights like tonight are pretty ideal. It’s clear, firstly, and not too windy, meaning it’s unlikely that clouds will mess with long times and a breeze won’t shake my shots.”

Johnny’s been doing astrophotography for a long enough time to know that explaining his work was not as interesting to anyone else as it was to him. It was tedious, and tended to involve a lot of tiny dials with minuscule writing, tripod mangling and patience. Everyone loved the photos that came out of it, but no one wanted to hear about his time spent sitting and freezing his ass off in his car as he waiting for exposures to run, or the embarrassing amount of time he’s spent trying to construct solid footing for his tripods. That’s why he can feel his face flush, just slightly, when during his telescope spiel, Jaehyun’s face seems to light up in real, genuine interest.

Jaehyun is expressive. His facial expression does a crazy reset every time Johnny says something particularly interesting, as if every word out of his mouth is afflicting some sort of world-shifting, life-changing impact on Jaehyun’s existence. When Johnny describes his first photos of the Andromeda Galaxy, his favorite photos he has ever taken, Jaehyun’s eyes widen and crinkle with wonder, as if struck with lightning. When Johnny describes the struggles he had finding a spot away from light pollution during his summers away from the university, Jaehyun’s jaw drops and concern knits his eyebrows, as if Johnny was telling him an adventurer’s harrowing tale of life or death tale, rather than some space nerds’. It’s mesmerizing. Johnny thinks he could talk to him forever if only just to watch the way he can build the universe in Jaehyun’s eyes. It’s like cradling someone’s entire emotional universe in the palm of his hand.

“I’m sorry I’m so bad at explaining this,” he laughs when he catches himself in a much too technical explanation of the types of lenses he uses and registers Jaehyun’s look of mild confusion. “I really should be better - I’m a TA, but no one’s really interested in anything about astrophotography besides the ‘pretty space pictures’.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Jaehyun rebuffs. “In all honesty, it’s understandable. This really does seem quite tedious, but you tell it so interestingly that I’m almost inclined to pretend like I don’t have ulterior motives of looking at the - what did you call them? The _pretty space pictures._ ” He grins.

Johnny matches it. Jaehyun’s honesty is endearing, and he’s absolutely right. Johnny points at the telescopes’ viewer. “Here, then. This is the finder scope. You’ll be able to see a broader view from this one than the zoom scope, which is mostly for use after using the finder,” he tells Jaehyun, gesturing for him to approach. The sigh of amazement that comes from Jaehyun as he peers through the scope makes Johnny’s heart flutter, just for a split second, and in that moment, he thinks he’s determined to hear it again, no matter what it would take. He would show him all the beautiful things he knew about the universe, and then some more, if that’s what it would take. Something about Jaehyun makes him want to give him the universe.

“Is this what you’re shooting tonight?”

Johnny shakes his head before realizing that Jaehyun is still staring intently into the telescope and can’t see him, and blurts out a rushed “No! No, not tonight. I’m just testing a new lens for some shoots I have planned for later this month. I can do it anytime, really, but if I’m going to be here for the undergrads I might as well get it done.”

Jaehyun stands up and hesitates, pause showing on his face. He looks to Johnny. “You probably get this a lot, but could you show me more of your work? Only because you mention you’re not busy.”

Johnny is honest when he replies. “I would love to.”

 

☆

 

The next time Johnny meets Jaehyun, he doesn’t really meet him at all - rather, he’s _met_. Johnny’s made the long walk up to the observatory so many times that for a second, when he passes the crest of the hill and the building comes into view, it takes him an extra few seconds to process what’s he’s seeing again as anything out of the ordinary at all. But there is, and it is, and oh, there’s a man. All that’s visible is a soft-looking mop of curls on a bowed head, figure curled up on itself as it shields from the wind.

“Jaehyun?”

His head snaps up. “Johnny!”

Jaehyun stands up from where he had been seated on a small bench outside the observatory. He’s wearing a long, red-plaid patterned coat that makes him tall and lithe, and suddenly, Johnny is oddly struck by how _real_ he looks. The sun hasn’t fully fallen behind the horizon yet, and Jaehyun now is warmly lit and made of solid lines, contrasting heavily with the last time Johnny had seen him. He’s much more confident than he was the first night they’d met, and the smile that breaks his face is one of genuine emotion, not of frozen, unsure friendliness like it had been on his first visit.

“I was thinking you’d be showing up soon.”

“It’s nice to see you again, and I mean that,” Johnny says. “Visitors to the observatory don’t often come back, if I’m being honest.” 

Jaehyun flushes slightly, pink barely tingeing the columns of his throat. “I figured. There’s not much here to an amateur.”

“It’s good to see you - it really is - but, uh. What are you, you know. Doing here.” Johnny asks, almost forgetting to make it a question. He realizes, a little belatedly, how it must sound to Jaehyun. A beat later, he realizes again how little he minds that he’s actually here. There’s a photo he’s saved on his phone that he took on the night they first met - the constellation lab - that he’s had on a mental to-do list on the back of his head ever since that night. _send astr photos from nov 7 to a ‘jung jaehyun’ - eng dept, 2nd yr grad student (???) ask ty if he knows - also if he’s gay but that’s priority number 2 - i think._ But the elusive Jaehyun was in front of him - here, and now - and he was beaming up at him, eager and bright-eyed, but what _for_ Johnny cannot figure out for the life of him.

“Sorry! Sorry, I’ve just been thinking so much about coming tonight that I forgot that you didn’t know I was. I-I looked it up. There’s a comet fly-by tonight? 46P, I think it said, or, Wirtanen? Something like that,” he says, seeming to lose confidence halfway through his sentence. “Just - I read it was kind of rare. And I thought you’d be here tonight. You know. To take photos of it. And I’d like to see it too - I heard it’s supposed to be green. I thought you’d know more about it than the internet could tell me. Plus, there’s no lab tonight, I asked another grad student, and I was thinking - just, you mentioned that astrophotography isn’t a particularly social activity, and I had nothing going on today, but if you’d rather be alone to shoot, it’s fine if I go really, you know what, I’ll just see myself out-”

“Jaehyun. Please breathe.”

He seems to catch himself again, and laughs, breathless and stilted.

“Okay. Sorry. Uh, long story short, I thought you would be here today, and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind some company. And I want to see the green comet. It sounds cool.”

Johnny decides to do a very un-Johnny-like thing and thinks before he says his next sentence. “You’re absolutely welcome to be stay. And I would love your company - I _am_ planning on shooting 46P tonight, you’ve got that part right. There’s so many things I wanted to show you from the last time you were here,” and he’s glad that he’s chosen his words so carefully and simply, because they seem to hit home, and Jaehyun’s eyes light up.

He unlocks the door to the observatory, already planning in his head which photos he was going to show Jaehyun and what he would say about them, hoping faintly that he would be just as excited to see them as he had been the last time. They go inside quickly, escaping the cool night air. Johnny sets down his photography kit and moves to turn on the lights, flooding the place with dim warmth. He makes himself busy with setting it up, not particularly sure of what to say to his guest but thankful for his presence anyway. Jaehyun looks around the observatory although he’s already been here, taking in the smooth curvature of the high walls and ceiling just for the sake of something to look at.

“How did you find out about Wirtanen? I can’t imagine it’s a very hot topic among the English graduate students,” he asks, so he can hear Jaehyun’s voice again.

When Jaehyun’s voice returns, soft around the edges from the echoey space, Johnny can hear the smile he’s speaking through. “I might not be an astronomy Ph.D candidate, but I am an avid Google user. It would seem like I was just waiting for another celestial event to have an excuse to get more free crash-courses on astrophotography. A coincidence signified by the alignment of the actual, non-metaphorical stars, if you will.”

“Do you want to try opening the ceiling?” he proposes suddenly. It seems like the type of job for Jaehyun.

Johnny guides Jaehyun’s hands to the pulley system attached to the wall, and shows him which buttons to him to make the old gears whirr satisfyingly and open up the domed ceiling of the observatory. The whole system turns, and the roof moves to expose them again to the fresh moonlight, falling on them like cool sheets of rain. Jaehyun is delighted.

Johnny’s knelt over his kit when a thought occurs to him. Jaehyun is wandering slowly around the circular room, black boots tapping slowly on the floor. “So you knew about the comet? Did you just guess that I was going to be here?”

Jaehyun scoffs, and it echoes amusedly around the space. “You’re enough of a nerd that I can’t imagine you missing a celestial event like this one. Besides, it’s not like I had your number to just ask if you would be.”

“And you still came?”

“Well, yeah. It was worth a shot. And again, _green_ comet. That’s wild.”

It’s dark out now, and they’re lit only by the soft warm lights of the windows of the observatory, but when Johnny turns to look at Jaehyun instead of up at the stars, it’s almost as if he can see him clearly for what feels like the first time. The cool light of the moon, hung in the sky as if just for them, strikes the planes of Jaehyun’s face and makes him soft and blurry, almost as if Johnny’s looking through a lens scattered with sun flares, and suddenly, Johnny doesn’t really care about the stupid comet, he’s much more interested in looking at Jaehyun’s face as they experience it together.

They wait together for the night to settle into the stronger, more pronounced darkness that astronomers live by. It’s not long before Johnny checks his watch, squints up at the sky, and through a grin, calls gently.

“Jaehyun. There it is.”

Jaehyun lets out a small gasp and clambers to his feet, even though he could just as easily keep looking up from his position seated in the big chair for the large observatory telescope, where he had insisted on sitting.

“It’s so green!”

Johnny laughs. “For an English graduate student, I expected more extravagant language.”

“Shut up, _look_! It’s _so_ green! This is amazing! Aren’t you going to take any photos?”

“My exposures are running. This is the fun part - now, I just get to watch.” Johnny means to be talking about the comet - but he thinks  what he really gets to watch is Jaehyun watching the comet, and for some reason, that’s infinitely more enticing in this moment.

Jaehyun lets out a low whistle. “I can’t believe this is going to be your job.”

“Me, neither.”

A comfortable silence settles, and Johnny forces himself to drag his eyes back to the comet, to at least achieve some semblance of normalcy. He can’t decide if he feels so oddly drawn to Jaehyun because he’s never had anyone else come on one of his shoots just to be there, or because it’s Jaehyun himself. Maybe it’s the fact that Jaehyun is the only one here at all that makes it special that it’s him. Not many were invested enough in Johnny’s habits to follow his every space-chasing whim. But Jaehyun had come, hadn’t he? Not even knowing if Johnny was going to be there at all - in the simple pursuit of chasing a comet, with the added benefit of Johnny, but not knowing if he was going to be there at all.

“Jaehyun.”

“Hmm?”

“Would you like to go out with me.”

“Oh.” His eyes widen, and for the first time since the green comet had made its debut on the night stage, he fully drags his eyes away from the stars and looks up at Johnny, meeting his eyes evenly, and the stars scatter from his vision and Jaehyun is nothing but crystal clear. “Johnny, I would love to.”

 

☆

 

Johnny’s mother, before he entered college for astronomy, had had quite a few things to say when she discovered his intentions of pursuing it in higher education. Astronomy, to Johnny at least, was all about the magic. There was still love in the topic to him - something romantic, endearing, genuine about his enamorment with the universe. If anyone understood his enchantment, it was his mother, and in her unending wisdom, she also understood that studying something had the infuriatingly unintended consequence of taking all the fun out of it. Killing the magic, so to say.

His mother had seen Johnny fall in love with the magic firsthand. School was a lot more work than he might be setting himself up for, she warned, and the adult world has its tragic ways of making the things we love unworthy of that love. Her reasoning, while communicated rather aggressively, made a lot of sense, and yet Johnny had made the ruefully and agonizingly conscious decision to ignore her.

That wasn’t to say that Johnny hadn’t considered it. He had considered it quite a lot, truthfully, and had almost clicked the little drop-down menu to change his intended major on his application to university to begin with, but managed to stop himself with a well-timed slap to his own face and a strangely lucid moment of self-evaluation. Astronomy, he thinks, is special in the capacity that it didn’t require the same sort of work on the part of the observer to find what made it pull at the heartstrings to begin with. Chemistry, for example, made every kid want to blow things up, or dissolve things in acid. It didn’t take long for many of them to learn that _real_ chemistry, at least the kind applicable in any academic setting, involved very little of that, and a lot more studying and measuring and general blandness. Johnny is very much an adult, but he likes to think that studying astronomy is really just cheating. He gets to be a kid again every day, giddily infatuated with the simple things: stars are sparkly, the colors are pretty and he just _likes_ them. He gets to sit in the tall chair in the observatory and play with the big, fancy telescope whenever he wants and call it _research_ , he can stay up late and watch vintage rocket launches and spacewalks on Youtube and call it _studying_. The magic was very much alive.

Johnny can’t argue that his mother was totally wrong, though. There were those moments where he had been burning the midnight oil but not even in a night under the stars, instead, cooped up in the library poring over calculus he was never going to learn or drawing infuriatingly intricate sky maps for assignments he was going to forget about the moment they were turned in. Johnny loved the night, usually, but hated those few, where the roof over his head, blocking his view of the very thing he was endeavoring to study, was almost a stubborn _fuck you_ to all the joy he found in it. Those nights, when Johnny would finally drag himself back to his dorm room, the stars would twinkle invitingly above him, but he forced his eyes to stay trained on the ground. A cold shoulder to the subject that had betrayed him. _How could you?_

He always came around. Eventually. It wasn’t even hard. By the next morning, he greets the stars, hidden behind the vast expanse of blue sky, but there, always there. _Hey. Sorry for yesterday - my fault, not yours. What do you have in store for me today?_ The universe hadn’t lost its magic. He had just misplaced it, lost in between the lines of his textbooks or obscured by layers and layers of equations.

As Jaehyun sits in front of him, wholly real and sipping lazily on his red milkshake straw as he scrolls through something on his phone, Johnny thinks again that his mother was wrong. When you love something, you can learn a lot about it and find it just as magical as it’s always been. It could be tedious, and generally more work than it’s worth, but wasn’t that just the way that love and magic went hand in hand? The more he learns about Jaehyun doesn’t destroy the magic, he thinks. That _is_ the magic. It’s him. Johnny is pretty sure he could learn enough about Jaehyun to fill encyclopedias and still be contented with learning it all over again if just to be around him.

This instance, for example. It’s well past midnight now, but they had both refused to finish their days - Jaehyun’s a long day of TAing in the English department, Johnny’s an equally long one spent cooped up in the astronomy department working on designing a new lab - without seeing each other. Jaehyun had taken one glance at the bags underneath Johnny’s eyes and decided that the moment they sat down together it was going to be lights out for the both of them. In lieu of a half-hearted Skype call that ended in both of them crashing, Jaehyun had dragged the both of them to a twenty-four hour diner, almost empty save for a few desperate students getting their fix of greasy food at this time. To Johnny’s own surprise, he almost didn’t mind being physically taken away from the prospect of sleep if it was to see Jaehyun’s own sleep deprivation break through his usually impervious exterior.

Jaehyun’s almost rabid insistence that they get some time together, even if it was delirious from exhaustion, is just a minuscule slice of what Johnny thinks Jaehyun’s magic is made up of. He’s a little pale, and there’s a ketchup stain on the left side of his white T-shirt, and the fluorescent lighting isn’t doing either of them any favors, but he’s _here,_ just sitting in front of Johnny anyway, and he’s so solid and constant that Johnny can’t help but think that this very simple fact of him might just be the most elusive magic of it all. So what if it wasn’t the most flattering - it was still Jaehyun.

“So.” Jaehyun starts. “You’ll have to correct me, Mr. _I’ve Been Observing Celestial Events Since I Was In Diapers,_ but according to my Google alert, there’s something coming up this month called a transit of Mercury, and if that name suggests anything, that sounds cool as _hell_. Talk to me.”

Johnny narrows his eyes mockingly. He can tell that Jaehyun is just trying to get him started on a tangent so he’ll talk enough to fill up the empty sounds with his own. “You’re just dating me for my encyclopedic knowledge of celestial phenomena and bottomless well of space facts.” He takes an indignant bite of a French fry and tosses the end back on the red plastic tray.

Jaehyun laugh at that, shoulders shaking gently. “It really isn’t your brains that I’m dating you for, if you think that’s why I like you so much. But woo me with a space fact anyway, astronaut, and we’ll see where it gets you.”

And that was how it started. The transit of Mercury. They had been sitting in the diner, both too tired to talk but too invested in each other to leave each other’s company to go to sleep. Johnny’s on teaching assistant mode, autopiloting through his explanation of the phenomenon to an enraptured, if not small, audience.

Jaehyun smacks a hand on the table, making the tray jump an inch in the air. “I want to see it.”

Johnny rubs his face with the heels of his hands and considers reconsidering all his life choices. “It’s on a Wednesday, though. We can’t just stay up all night watching stars, we have classes the next day.”

“Yes, but we have classes _every_ day. Mercury only transits the sun thirteen times each century!”

“Why do you even ask me to explain this stuff to you anyway? You already know all of this, I _saw_ you looking it up earlier.”

“Yeah.” Jaehyun sits forwards, resting his head on his hands and getting up close to Johnny’s face. “But I like it more when you tell it to me.” His breath ghosts over Johnny’s face, and he crinkles his nose.

And that had been it. Johnny sighs, resigned but equally excited, and begins to mentally plot out an observation trip for Wednesday to watch the transit of Mercury. Jaehyun had hit Johnny’s sweet spot, landing in the soft weakness that lived in between Johnny’s love for space and his love for Jaehyun. That was part of his magic, too.

 

☆

 

If Johnny was a better poet, he thinks he’d be able to write epics comparing his love for the universe to Jaehyun.

According to theories of multiple dimensions, which somehow always seem to get lumped in with conversations about astronomy, philosophers proposed an infinite series of multiverses, under which every possible imagination of any known world exists. Under that theory, there’s a dimension out there where everything is exactly the same - except Johnny is really, really good at poetry. In that dimension, he figures, this is what he would write about.

Jaehyun’s not really _close_ to any astronomical phenomena that Johnny can imagine - ‘close’ in galactic terms was still quite far, after all. But if there was one, in manner of scale and in of sheer reality, he figures the closest would have to be the Pillars of Creation.

Technically, the Pillars of Creation was the name of a photograph - more specifically, a photograph of the Serpens constellation, in the Eagle Nebula. He likes this name more, though. It’s a bit more romantic, more reminiscent of a thing of romantic, fallacy-ridden human tradition than a cluster of unfeeling space molecules. They’re huge columns of gas, in the vague shape of three large columns of immeasurable size. Within them, stars are constantly being created, born out of the swirling masses of particles and heat. The stars that the Pillars create, in turn, release light that erodes the very structures that allowed their birth.

Jaehyun does that to him, too, he thinks. Not in such a cruel or malicious way, if those assignments of character could even be given to natural astronomical occurrences, but it’s almost as if the star that is Jaehyun is burns so brightly, so close, that Johnny almost has to look away sometimes. If he has been nothing before this, he likes to think that Jaehyun has made him into something, something with form and figure, that can shine and burn and _be_. And in that same capacity, Jaehyun could shine so brightly that he could go off, like a supernova, through everything that Johnny is and knows. But he would allow it, of course, because it’s only in his love he is something to begin with at all.

But Jaehyun doesn’t. Johnny likes to think that he is simply basking in his light, not eroded or outdone by it but instead contented to sit back and watch it shine just for him. Johnny trusts him to, but not _human_ trust. He entrusts Jaehyun with his heart of hearts in the same way that he trusts that the sun will go down at night and allow the stars to shine, in the same way he trusts that the Pillars of Creation will continue to churn, living and dying in the same moment. Maybe trust isn’t the word at all - it is just a chemical process that would happen if he knew of it or not - but that’s what Johnny knows it is. It’s trust.

That’s what he _would_ say, anyway. If he was a better poet. But he’s not, and Johnny doesn’t think he can really compare Jaehyun to any constellation, star cluster, or galaxy at all. All of that was just noise, much too complicated to change the fact of how simply and purely he loved Jaehyun. There was no science to the way that Jaehyun flops, wholeheartedly, into the couch in Johnny’s apartment and lets out a delighted yet exhausted groan.

“This is getting annoying,” Jaehyun says, voice muffled as he speaks into the curve of Johnny’s couch cushions. “It’s too late to go home, but I don’t have time tomorrow to run home and change. Even my stupid undergrads are starting to ask if I own more than two shirts. And it’s not even some one-night stand or wild party, either. I just have a dumb boyfriend whose nerdy habits rubbed off on me, and now I can’t stop _stargazing_.”

He laughs. “You love it, and you’re welcome. Just wear something of mine.”

“Yeah, like wearing what are clearly someone else’s clothes makes it any less obvious.”

It’s late, but when is not when they’re together? Johnny is still standing in the doorway, stamping mud off his boots that he’s picked up from the wet grass near the observatory. It’s almost three in the morning, and they’ve just returned from yet another observing trip, this time out to a mountain base camp where Johnny knew the owner, who would let him set up shop for free.

They had made this an annoying habit, ever since the first night in the diner, planning their first stargazing excursion as a couple. Jaehyun, in his infinite wisdom, would find some celestial event on the internet that he insisted on seeing in real life, not through a screen. And who was Johnny to say no, especially with Jaehyun’s particularly nasty tendency to ask when they were in, ah, rather _compromising_ situations? And Johnny, equally out of pride and actual interest in the event, would drag his boyfriend up to the observatory or out to the desert with him, where they would stay to some ridiculous hour and not return until they were both soft in the eyes and giggly with exhaustion.

It had led to more than a few nights like this one. They had driven back to Johnny’s crappy graduate student apartment in the giant red pickup, astrophotography equipment and telescopes tucked carefully and neatly into the bed of the truck. The roads were empty at this time of night, but the quiet music playing on the stereo and the sound of Jaehyun’s slow breathing next to him were more than enough to keep Johnny engaged. He had to be up for classes in four hours, but he thinks that on the road back to his apartment, time isn’t really real.

It was October now, almost a year after their first trip that had started it all, and tonight’s headliner had been the Orionids meteor shower. From the tall hill of the observatory, the streaks of light peppering the vast expanse of the sky were few and far, but when one blast would break across the sky, Jaehyun would gasp and exclaim in awe. His eyes reflected the mass of lights littering the sky, and Johnny is almost inclined to turn his camera to capture Jaehyun’s face instead of the meteors raining down in the distance.

“What are you looking at? You’re missing it!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Johnny turned back to the shower of lights, but inched closer to Jaehyun to clasp his hand in his own.

In the year since the transit, they had been on too many trips to count, but they only seemed to get more enjoyable as they learned each other patterns and became a unit. Johnny looks over at Jaehyun’s figure now, hours later, squished into the creases of the couch, form unrecognizable. He decides it doesn’t any stupid science or poetry to say what he feels, in his heart of hearts, in that moment.

“Move in with me, then.”

Jaehyun snorts. “Please. As much as I like your place more than mine, we’re not moving in together into _this_ apartment.”

“Then we’ll move out together. I could stand to get out of here. We’re graduating next year. We could do it. A place in the city, so we don’t have to move again when we get jobs.”

Jaehyun raises his face from its position buried in the couch. “You’re serious.”

He nods.

And just like that, it’s that simple. Jaehyun looks into his eyes, and he looks back, and Jaehyun falls into his arms, and Johnny catches him, and for now, it’s that easy. Jaehyun shines, and Johnny meets him where he stands to lay easy in his light. _Yes_.

 

☆

 

“The pale blue dot,” Johnny says. “That’s the phrase Carl Sagan used to describe this legendary photo - taken in 1990 by the first Voyager. It looks like a light show, or some random streaks of color - but it’s not. There’s this one part of the photo, and there’s a tiny little blue speck of light it in, and it honestly looks like it could be just a flaw in the photo, or some dust on your screen. But it’s a photo of Earth. Everything we’ve ever known is contained in this little speck. He described us as a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’.”

“I like it.”

“I thought you would.”

“It’ll be the first, then. The first thing that’s _ours._ ”

It’s fitting that the photograph belongs to the two of them now. The pale blue dot, after all, does encompass everything that Johnny knows. His family, his friends, the astronomer’s club, the observatory, and now, this apartment that houses the two of them, a little ragged from a whole day of moving boxes and climbing stairs. Without unpacking anything else but some sheets and pillows, they eat a takeout meal on an overturned box under the single photograph of _The Pale Blue Dot_ hanging on the wall. They have lazy, sleepy sex, too tired to do much else but not feeling right doing anything but christening the new bed, and in the fuzzy-edged, film-tinged darkness with Jaehyun shuddering softly under him, Johnny thinks that his world could be a lot bigger, and he wouldn’t really mind, because he’s quite happy with his world now.

But for as small as the pale blue dot makes him _feel_ , Johnny is unfortunately the same size, and shoulders the same size responsibilities as he did before, now exacerbated by the new apartment. It’s still the first weekend, which is a double-edged sword with all the work that they have to do with the apartment, but it’s still fun at this point, so it’s doable. Johnny hears Jaehyun come home before he can see him, door slamming and heavy boots landing on the floor as he kicks them off. He’s seated at the coffee table sorting through a box of old photos, mostly of his astronomical observations but a few interspersed of memories he hasn’t recalled in years.

“Youngho?” Jaehyun calls, and he sounds frustrated. “The landlord said he can put in a work order to fix the broken tiles in the bathroom, but we have to provide the tiles ourselves, and have them ready by Monday if we want them to do the repair within the week.”

“By Monday? We don’t have time, I have to go to the stupid DMV, don’t you remember, to change my address-”

“ _Tomorrow_? You can’t, I need the truck, Taeyong asked me to help move some equipment for the astronomer’s club.”

“Jae, you can’t be promising people the truck _already_ , we just moved, you knew we were going to be running around doing stupid errands this whole weekend, we need it-”

“It’s Taeyong! I wasn’t about to say no to him, he’s done so much for us already-”

“Well, then we need to tell the landlord that he needs to get maintenance to get the tile themselves, I don’t know why you agreed at all, it’s _ridiculous_ to expect your tenants to do that-”

“I wasn’t about to-”

Jaehyun freezes, hands stilled with the groceries he’s unbagging still in them. He puts down a plastic baggie of lettuce and turns to Johnny, still seated at the low coffee table sorting through photos. His eyes widen.

“Oh, Johnny. We need to get out of here, don’t we.”

Johnny is about to reply when Jaehyun answers his own question, seeming conflicted. “Oh, but we’ve only _just arrived_ , there’s so much to do, not to mention getting back to school on Monday-”

“Jaehyun.” Johnny strides up to the kitchen island and catches his wrist, where his hand had been about to delve back into a bag to keep unpacking. He waits for Jaehyun to look at him. Johnny meets his gaze back, grin slowly breaking his face. “Just for a while.”

Jaehyun’s smile is practically musical. He is blinding in his reply. “If you insist. Just for a little while.”

 

☆

 

Johnny has always been fascinated by the lunar eclipse, but what amateur astronomer wasn’t? The solar eclipse - now _that_ was a phenomenon, the news headlines would tell you, and photos of families all decked out in eclipse sunglasses and huge smiles would probably convince you the same. But Johnny didn’t quite care for the nature of the solar eclipse - they were harder to observe, and the bustle and brightness of the day didn’t quite suit his astronomical observation preferences. His ideal eclipse, could he come up with a perfect world, would be a quiet night, perhaps a little farther from civilization than he would usually go to stargaze, just him and his telescope. Johnny found the silence of the nighttime to be a more reflective time than any. Sagan wrote that astronomy was a “humbling and character-building experience,” and Johnny had to admit that he had never been more humbled than standing alone in the middle of nowhere, eyes turned to the sky in silent amazement of the universe he was so, so small in.

It was in this that he found the eclipse particularly fascinating. Had it been a world blind to the phenomena it was witnessing, the moon would still hang in the sky and glow red as it was, caring not for the audience it was performing for. Whether thousands of faces turned up to the sky as the clock ticked well into the next morning or not, the moon would stay as red as it was for the night, and proceed on its way of the cycle the next night. Then, would today’s blood moon be as beautiful as it was if there were none to appreciate its spectacularity? It would surely be “red”, that much was to be certain, but he likes to think that it’s the small weight of childlike wonder that each of the people that gaze at the moon hold in their hearts that makes it infinitely, undeniably a thing of _beauty._ Because the red tint of the moon tonight is aesthetically engaging, and it grabs the eye of all who see it as an objective, single item of pleasing form and color, but the eclipse is only beautiful in the way that it’s tangled up in the weak, pliable human minds, who somehow perceive some occurrence totally and unshakably one of nature as a symbol of human significance. He had never been so confused as to why eclipses were interpreted as the bastion of change when they could be calculated down to the day, hour, minute for however far into the future as anyone cared to look. Whether the universe was to bring change to those to saw it in the eclipse or not, the moon would glow red all the same. The scientific part of his mind knows this. But he cannot help but feel the tug on his heartstrings when the trucks’ tires come to a slow, rolling stop on the packed desert earth, and he and Jaehyun look at each other, excitement for the night barely contained. He decides, then, that the eclipses’ relationship to change is definitely not causal, but he won’t argue against correlational, because when he looks at him there’s nothing he can feel but the weight of the knowledge that _something_ has changed, and maybe, just maybe, he and Jaehyun are irrevocably and inextricably intertwined.

They are different people, but the moment they break eye contact, they both spring into action. Johnny spills out of the passenger side of the truck, already whooping and making noise for the sake of hearing it, himself and only that, in the desert night. The vast expanse of sand in front of him is littered with sporadic cacti and shrubs, but its open facade is just so inviting, and Johnny can’t help but sprint for a few seconds towards the moon, already hanging demurely in the sky. The desert is freezing already, and the cold air burns his face when he wheels around to look back at Jaehyun, huge grin uncontainable. He lets off another cry of sheer joy, just to listen to it peter off, uninterrupted in the seemingly infinite desert. Jaehyun looks back at him, bundled up in his massive scarf so only his face is visible, but his eyes are soft with endearment. Johnny makes eye contact with him and forges his way back to where he stands near the truck, giggling softly, to press a kiss on the boy who had been so captivated just watching his boyfriend yell at the desert and dance around like a fool in the moonlight.

They unload the telescope from the bed of the truck together, Jaehyun’s once inexperienced hands more confident setting up the large black lens and powering it up.

Johnny likes to think that Jaehyun is the same as the lunar eclipse. Had he not greeted the young stargazer with the large eyes and the blinding yet occasional smile on that first night, would Jaehyun be as beautiful as he is now, staring in wonder at the expanse of sky laid before them? If the two had never even crossed paths, he would just be another stargazer, eyes coming to learn the placement of constellations in the inky black sky like familiar friends. If Johnny had not been there to observe him, to assign love to everything about him, to take him into his heart as he’s done, Jaehyun would still be as beautiful as he was. It was simply Johnny’s folly - his purely, wholly human folly of weak heart and swaying affection - that had fallen so deeply in love with him, and in this, Johnny thinks that he is simply an observer of the beauty Jaehyun exudes, just as humans gaze up and find a blood moon beautiful, even though it would be just as it was had no one been watching. Jaehyun is beautiful as he is now, setting up his telescope by checking the dials and adjusting the height, this is undeniable. But Johnny goes up to him anyway, and tucks his chin into the crook of his neck and drops a light kiss on the curve of his jaw, and whispers a careful _I love you_ into the soft skin there, and he thinks that Jaehyun _glows_ , beautiful, as always, but brought to life under the eyes and in the heart of his love.

They end up curled together on the bed of the pickup, both hilariously unwieldy and uncoordinated in their massive puffy coats but similarly unwilling to retreat to the warmth of the truck. Johnny’s taken enough photos to last him a solid month of sorting, editing and sending to publications, and Jaehyun had been content to simply sit and watch the stars move slowly around them.

(“They’re actually not moving, we are. The Earth’s rotation changes the position of the stars, that’s why we need a polar star. Did you know that in about twelve thousand years there’s going to be a different polar star? The Earth’s axis is actually wobbling, and-”

"Ok, Johnny, got it. The stars aren’t moving, we are. Thank you.”)

Swathed in blankets, only their faces are cold in the frigid desert night, but the numbness doesn’t stop Jaehyun from swinging a leg over Johnny’s lap and littering him with clumsy, freezing kisses that Johnny loves all the same. The only sounds this far out in the desert is quiet music playing on the truck stereo, the sound of their lips moving together and Jaehyun’s occasional low moans.

“You’re blocking my view of the sky,” Johnny teases, lips still pressed up against Jaehyun.

“I’m the only view you need.”

“Well, we did come all the way out here to stargaze. I could have as much of you as I wanted back at uni. I might also point out that you can’t see the sky, either.”

Jaehyun pulls back slightly, and regards Johnny with a kind of amused smirk. “Sure, I can’t see the sky. But I came here for you,” he says unabashedly, expression simple. “You’re more beautiful than the stars.”

And in this statement he is so earnest, and his love is so clear and plain on his face that Johnny cannot even return it with one of his own, just push himself up on this elbows to meet Jaehyun’s lips again with his own and kiss him silly, this boy of his, his stargazer who saw nothing but him.

 

☆

 

They’ve known each other, counterintuitively, mostly in darkness. There are only really two times that Johnny thinks he can truly slow down and _look_ at Jaehyun, just look and look and drink in the details of the face he loves so much without abandon or embarrassment. Johnny is the most familiar with Jaehyun’s face upturned to the sky, lit only on the soft curve of his jaw and laid over his forehead with gentle moonlight. He’s at his most beautiful looking up at the stars. The other is just as dark; it’s made of the fuzzy outline of Jaehyun’s face, half covered by the curve of his pillow, eyes shut and breath quiet. But Johnny decides, in this moment, that Jaehyun belongs in the light.

It’s a quiet Saturday morning in their new neighborhood, and the enticing notion of breakfast had been the only thing dragging them out of bed. Moving together, instead of one to the other, had the beautiful perk of giving both a new locality to explore and learn intimately, to become a home for the two as a unit, _Jaehyun and Johnny, Johnny and Jaehyun_. Jaehyun is insistent on taking it systematically, scrolling through internet reviews of each breakfast spot within a mile as Johnny laces up his boots.

“The trick,” he announces as they march down the stairs, “is to _not_ pick the best one first. Then we’ll just keep going and going there and never explore. We have to pick places for their specialties. So,” he says, wheeling around dramatically at the bottom of the steps to look up at Johnny, just a few behind him. “My astronomer. What would you like to eat on this fine morning?”

The fact of the matter remains that as much as Johnny might detest daytime astronomical observation, light really does allow him to see what he’s surrounded by for what it is. When he looks at Jaehyun now, seated across from him in the tiny breakfast spot they’ve picked, babbling on about this place’s special latte art techniques and excellent reviews of their French omelets, he can really _see_ him. He sees it all - the stray wisps of hair peering up at strange angles, the smile lines that deepen when he talks, the magic of it all. The unintended consequence of this, of course, is that Jaehyun can see him back, and gives him a quizzical look when he notices Johnny’s unwavering stare. But at this point, Johnny decides that it doesn’t really matter. He stares and he stares, and he can see Jaehyun for _everything_ he is, even as he swats at him and begs him to _please stop looking at me, you’re so embarrassing, I can’t take you anywhere._ The morning sunshine is lazy and warm, almost buttery as it streams through the window of the cafe and sprawls lazily on the table where it rests on their hands, casually intertwined. The light suits him in so many ways for him not to belong here; Johnny thinks that the sunshine at this time of mid-morning would be especially striking on a ring on his left hand. Jaehyun eventually gives up and sits still, quietly allowing his boyfriend to just _look_ at him, as he is now, still a little messy and soft-eyed from the morning, but undeniably and unashamedly _his._  Jaehyun is the most beautiful here, because when the light strikes him, his eyes look just like pale blue dots, and in them, Johnny thinks he can just make out his world.

**Author's Note:**

> i don’t know jack shit about astronomy. can you tell 
> 
> [tumblr](http://tenxism.tumblr.com)//[twitter](http://twitter.com/gothsseo)<3


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